I became a black woman in Spokane. But, Rachel Dolezal, I was a black girl first

Rachel Dolezal is, after this week, a symbol to many African Americans of the separation of blackness from black people; to me, she is an example of how American society simultaneously devalues the individuality of black women and us as a community to the point that the performance of black womanhood is preferred over the people. If blackness can simply be worn or performed, then every white woman with a weave and a cause, every white girl with a snap and a little attitude, can supplant the lived experiences of what it is to become a black woman: the journey of discrimination, the camaraderie of sisterhood, discovering the deep sense of responsibility and weight of the world, and ultimately finding the inner strength and acceptance that can only be built through struggle.

Rachel Dolezal may have perfected her performance of black womanhood, and she may be connected to black communities and feel an affinity with the styles and cultural innovations of black people. But the black identity cannot be put on like a pair of shoes. Our external differences from the white majority might be how others categorize us as black, but it’s the thread of our diverse lived experiences that make us black women.

Dolezal’s specious claims to black ancestry and faux black identity could not have been sustained and she would not have been able to pass if black womanhood were seen and understood as more than skin – or weave – deep. Wearing black womanhood was apparently even enough for Dolezal’s “fellow” black leaders in Spokane, Washington, who turned a blind eye to what the wider world now recognizes as her all-but laughable claims of racial identity, whether out of fear of rocking the boat or plain Northwestern niceness. Her charade could have only been maintained in a town (and within a society) with simplistic, stereotypical conceptions of blackness – that blackness is a shade on the range on olive to dark chocolate, a set of idioms delivered in a cadence from which American English derives its slang, and any number of bodily characteristics or mannerisms familiar across the globe, among others. And yet, while black Americans have long embraced a diverse array of lineages as kin, simply looking the part and faking the rest doesn’t cut it.

Whenever I tell people that I grew up in Spokane – a city in which only 2% of the population was black – I usually neutralize their confusion with a joke about how I was one of about seven black people, and five of us made it out. You see, black people aren’t supposed to live is small towns in the Pacific Northwest of this country; blackness has been defined as an “urban” identity. But while the majority of black people in the United States do still live in the southern states, and concentrations of black folks outside the south tend to be around metorpolitan areas, neither fact accounts for the constant migration of black people toward economic opportunities, including to places like Spokane. Their migration to Spokane in particular may just have been the inspiration for the establishment of the original headquarters of the Aryan Nations 37 miles [60km] away.

I was born in the middle of Spokane’s first (and only) black mayor’s tenure: a celebrated leader who black people worked hard to elect, and example of “acceptable” black leadership, Mayor Jim Chase once told the local paper that he “never knew much discrimination in Spokane.” While that was perhaps true for him, it was not my family’s experience, nor the experience of the black people who lived through segregation through the 1970s in Spokane. Though segregation was no longer enshrined in law in the 1980s when I was growing up, black folks still lived almost exclusively on the east side of town and in the historical neighborhoods built for railroad laborers. My Midwestern white mother and black Puerto Rican father had moved to Spokane for college and defied the unspoken segregation by starting their family in a working class north side neighborhood away from the black enclave, but hoping for the best. My father left the picture shortly after I was born and my mother navigated the discrimination we faced in school and throughout town – I became familiar with the meaning of “nigger” quite early in life.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/14/became-a-black-woman-spokane-rachel-dolezal-black-girl